The handling of live missile boosters presents obvious dangers to personnel. Conventional safe and arm devices are mechanical relays that fully isolate the battery from the squib for purposes of firing train interruption. Applicable specifications (e.g. Mil-STD-1901A) typically require safe and arm devices to include the ability to eliminate a single fault scenario. Particular program requirements may impose more stringent safety specifications.
Although desirable results have been achieved using prior art safe and arm devices, there may be room for improvement. For example, each missile may have a variety of critical signals that must be isolated, each of which may have widely different voltage and current levels. A particular missile's load current variability may be very high with an extremely wide voltage range that requires a specific design solution. Thus, conventional safe and arm devices are typically designed for a particular missile, and lack the capacity to handle the range of voltages and current variabilities presented by multiple missile types.